Tweephone Sends Tweets from Analog Rotary-Dial Telephone

Tweephone, the world's first analog Twitter client

Nobody has ever wished that Twitter’s 140-character limit were even stricter, but then, nobody before had ever tried Tweeting from an old-school rotary-dial phone. Enter Tweephone, a phone that will let you do just that.

Tweephone was made to celebrate the first birthday of the UP Digital Bureau in Ukraine. It embeds an Arduino and a two-line LCD screen into a vintage telephone. To Tweet, you lift the handset and dial. Letters are selected just like on a pushbutton phone. To type the letter “a” for example, you dial 2 once. To get an “f”, dial 3 three times.

Just stay away from letters at the end of the alphabet or your Tweets will take you forever. You will also realize why I used to hate people with zeros in their numbers when I was younger.

Once you have slowly dialed in your message, you just hang up and the Tweet is sent. You can follow Tweephone on Twitter. And if you do, you’ll be unsurprised to discover that all of its Tweets are very, very short. In fact, the longest on on the first page is just 40 characters.